“What did you do about the wasp, Linda?” he whispered.
“I delicately erased the stinger, fluffed up a ruffle, and put the sketch under lock and key. I should have started a fire with it, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to let it go, yet.”
“Is she going to hold out?” asked Peter.
“She’ll hold out or get her neck wrung,” said Linda. “I truly think she has been redeemed. She has been born again. She has a new heart and a new soul and a new impulse and a right conception of life. Why, Peter, she has even got a new body. Her face is not the same.”
“She is much handsomer,” said Peter.
“Isn’t she?” cried Linda enthusiastically. “And doesn’t having a soul and doesn’t thinking about essential things make the most remarkable difference in her? It is worth going through a fiery furnace to come out new like that. I called her Abednego the other day, but she didn’t know what I meant.”
Then they sat silent and watched the sea for a long time. By and by the night air grew chill. Peter slipped from the rock and went up the beach and came back with an Indian blanket. He put it very carefully around Linda’s shoulders, and when he went to resume his seat beside her he found one of her arms stretching it with a blanket corner for him. So he sat down beside her and drew the corner over his shoulder; and because his right arm was very much in his way, and it would have been very disagreeable if Linda had slipped from the rock and fallen into the cold, salt, unsympathetic Pacific at nine o’clock at night—merely to dispose of the arm comfortably and to ensure her security, Peter put it around Linda and drew her up beside him very close. Linda did not seem to notice. She sat quietly looking at the Pacific and thinking her own thoughts. When the fog became damp and chill, she said they must be going, and so they went back to their cars and drove home through the sheer wonder of the moonlight, through the perfume of the orange orchards, hearing the night song of the mocking birds.
CHAPTER XXXIII
The Lady of the Iris
A few days later Linda and Peter went to San Francisco and helped celebrate the marriage of Marian and Eugene Snow. They left Marian in a home carefully designed to insure every comfort and convenience she ever had planned, furnished in accordance with her desires. Both Linda and Peter were charmed with little Deborah Snow; she was a beautiful and an appealing child.